A field guide to IndieWeb slash pages
A field guide to the small pages that make up an IndieWeb personal site. The slash pages, the lightweight standards, the little rituals that turn a blog into a home on the internet.
Most of what makes a personal site feel like a person is not the blog posts. It is the little pages next to them.
Each entry below is short on purpose. A description, where the convention came from when that is known, what the page is actually for, and a real example where one exists. Most sites only have two or three of these. That is fine. Pick the ones that fit.
Pages about the present
/now
A /now page answers what you are doing right now. Not last year, not in theory, this season. The current city, the current project, the current book, the thing you keep thinking about.
Derek Sivers started the convention in 2015. Sites update the page every few months as life shifts. nownownow.com keeps a directory of them.
It reads like a note to a friend who has not seen you in a year. That is the whole appeal.
/uses
A /uses page lists the tools you live in. Hardware, software, keyboard, editor, coffee method, desk chair.
Wes Bos started collecting these. uses.tech lists them now. Readers love them, other bloggers love them, and any time a stranger asks what you use to write or code, the answer is one link.
It is the closest thing personal blogging has to a trade show booth. Three paragraphs instead of a convention centre.
Pages about the future
/someday
A /someday page is a list of things you want to do, but not right now. Trips, projects, books to write, an instrument to pick up. A daydream ledger kept in public.
Alexander Sandberg started the convention. someday.page collects them.
The trick is that most entries never happen, and the page is honest about that. It is permission to daydream in public without pretending every item is a plan.
Pages about the site itself
/colophon
A colophon explains how the site is built. Fonts, host, generator, typography, colour palette, any credits worth naming.
The word comes from old book printing. The last page of a printed book used to name the printer, the type, the paper. Sites borrow the tradition.
Future you will love reading this. So will the next person who wants to know what generator you chose.
/humans.txt
A plain text file at /humans.txt that credits the people behind the site. Designer, writer, photographer, the friend who gave feedback at midnight.
humanstxt.org proposed the convention years ago. It is a robots.txt for humans, served at the site root.
Most sites don't bother. The ones that do tend to be the sort of sites that still care about credits.
/changelog
A log of changes to the site itself. Design tweaks, stack swaps, new pages, old pages retired.
Not a content log. The posts already live in the feed. This page is for the architecture.
Readers who come back after six months can see what moved, and you can see how your taste drifted.
Pages about what you read and follow
/reading
A list of what you are reading or have read. Sometimes with ratings. Sometimes with a one-line note. Sometimes both. Often named /books or /library instead.
Book recommendations scaled to one person's taste are better than a Goodreads page, because a reader who already trusts your writing will trust your shelf.
/blogroll
A list of other blogs you read, with links and sometimes a sentence about why each one earns the slot.
Blogrolls used to live in sidebars. They moved to dedicated pages once sidebars went away. blogroll.blog is a version of this on a larger scale.
Pointing your readers at other writers is a generous act. The web gets smaller when nobody does.
/follow
Every feed and handle the site owner can be followed at. RSS, Atom, Mastodon, Bluesky, email, JSON feed, whatever the reader prefers.
One page answers the question "how do I keep up with this person" without making the reader hunt for a broken icon in the footer.
Two minutes of work. Saves every future reader thirty seconds.
Pages about community
/guestbook
A page where readers leave a note. A hello, a reaction, a thank you.
Guestbooks are as old as personal home pages. They went away when spam made them unusable. They came back once email-backed forms and lightweight moderation made them workable again.
A guestbook is low-stakes proof the site is read. Sometimes that is all a writer needs.
/webring
A webring is a small circle of sites that link to each other. Each site shows a "next" and "previous" link near the footer. Click through and you land on a stranger's site that the ring's curator thought was worth reading.
Mid-90s convention. Rings were how readers found blogs before search engines got good.
A slow, neighbourly alternative to algorithmic discovery. Rings are back in corners of the web that remember them.
Pages for work in progress
/garden
A digital garden is a collection of notes that are half-finished on purpose. Ideas grow, get rewritten, sometimes die in the corner. The pages link to each other rather than sit in a reverse-chronological feed.
Mike Caulfield and Maggie Appleton wrote about the pattern. Appleton's long essay on the digital garden ethos is the piece most writers link to when they explain the shape.
It is permission to publish without a blog post's obligation to be finished.
/til
Today I Learned. A log of small facts picked up while working. One entry per fact, timestamped, searchable.
Josh Branchaud kept the early GitHub repo that made the format visible. Simon Willison runs one of the most active public examples at til.simonwillison.net.
Low-effort publishing that doubles as a searchable memory for yourself.
Where to start
You don't need all of these. Most personal sites have two or three, chosen because the writer actually uses them.
Pick /now if you want a reason to check in on your own life every few months. Pick /uses if people keep asking what you write with. Pick /blogroll if you want to point people at writers you love. Start with one. Add another when the first starts feeling honest.
Then submit your blog, and read the short version of what any of this is actually about.